Monday, 14 June 2010

Time for a recipe - and since I should currently be cooking over a camp stove, I need to hand this one over to one of my Twitter buddies.

Jenny has a fun video blog at Jenny Learns to Cook, which has only been running since March, so please go and support her. Since I haven't got the whole video thing down, yet (something I promise to work on now I have a camera which takes video!) she kindly agreed to write actual words for this post. I think you'll find her personality and style still shines through!

My brother is a vegan hippie and it was his birthday last week, so a trip to Whole Foods and a first time experience with Indian ingredients was in store. This recipe is fun if only for the reason that it's insanely easy - throw a bunch of stuff together and bake it in vague ball shapes - and yet mention them to someone and jaws drop, backs get patted... or maybe that only happened in my imagination. Cilantro can have that effect on you. So first, the ingredients:

Chickpea Flour was the hardest thing to find ever. Or not really. I found it at Whole Foods, buried at the bottom of the flour section. Only problem: since you only need about a cup for this, I now have a ¾ full bag of Chickpea Flour with no idea how to finish it off. Also - I read that if you can't find it, you can substitute it by roasting some dry garbanzos and grinding them up yourself. Might even be more cost effective.

Roast your sweet potatoes on 450°F (230°C) for 45 minutes. Then take them out and let them cool while you smell up your kitchen with the cardamom, cumin, cilantro, garlic, chickpea flour, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Or, if that list was too long for your attention span, everything except the olive oil and sesame seeds.

That happens to me a lot with recipes - I get a "skim" attitude. No matter how many times I force myself to read EVERY INGREDIENT, I can't. So, yea. Take out all of the ingredients, hide the sesame seeds and oil, and mix everything else together... just don't forget where you hid them, because you need them later. Anyway.

Mash it all together with a fork, and let it sit in the fridge for about an hour. Or a potato masher. But I do not own a dishwasher, so the fewer utensils I can use, the better.

I actually had to make these a day ahead, so I'll find out if a cold, hard night does anything to my poor falafels. A day later, ball 'em up. I used an ice cream scoop so they would be vaguely the same size, but you still have to go all play-dough on they're asses if you want nicer shapes.

Sprinkle with sesame seeds (or in hindsight, rolling them around until you can't see any orange would have been utterly divine) and pop into a 400°F (200°C) oven for 20 minutes, and VIOLA! I ate mine on a whole wheat pita with hummus and avocado slices. Because it was my brother's birthday and he's a hippie. So there.

PS - I found this recipe at 101 Cookbooks, so click the link for their article.

I'm in Greenland! I promise to catch up on comments, and come round and visit you all, just as soon as I get home. I'll try to keep in touch via Twitter and my Facebook page.

YUM! Funnily enough, I have a fridge jam-packed with chickpeas at the moment due to a miscalculation in how much the little buggers were going to expand after I soaked them and simmered them. But the curried potato-chickpea salad was divine. Plus now I can make it three or four more times.

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